Change and retention in annotated manuscripts of West Africa

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Different domains of manuscript culture transform at different pace. Some manuscript practices sustain through time, while others change or disappear. Thus, the Soninke manuscripts with commentaries on Ibn Mahīb’s poem do not show any significant change in layout and annotations over the 19th to 21st centuries, whereas the Qur’an manuscripts with annotations in Old Kanembu ceased to exist in the 19th century. The project will study the factors behind the transformation of the Soninke and Old Kanembu manuscript cultures, especially in the late 19th and 20th centuries. The project will explore which domains of these cultures are more stable and why. Given the largely unrelated nature of the Soninke and Old Kanembu written traditions, the results of the proposed project will have a typological importance for the study of dynamics of manuscript cultures in general.